Madam Speaker, it is with some sadness that I address Bill C-11, an act to authorize the divestiture of the assets of, and to dissolve, the Cape Breton Development Corporation, to amend the Cape Breton Development Corporation Act and to make consequential amendments to other Acts.
I will explain why I feel this sadness. On January 28, 1999, the federal Minister of Natural Resources announced the closure of the Phalen coal mine and the privatization of the Prince mine, both located on Nova Scotia's Cape Breton Island and managed by a crown corporation, Devco.
At the time, close to 1,700 miners were working for the crown corporation. About 1,000 people find themselves out of work, in a region where unemployment is already at 25%.
At the same time, the minister announced $110 million in assistance to be used for severance pay and early retirement programs for the miners, as well as $68 million for economic development in the region. The Government of Nova Scotia announced in the fall that it would be investing $12 million in the long term economic development of Cape Breton.
It is important to understand that Devco workers are not pleased with the severance package and with the proposed payments. For well over a year now, since February 1999, they have been making representations to the federal government, asking it to reconsider its decisions and to improve its proposals.
In fact, on December 23, a committee made up of representatives from all parties in the legislative House of Assembly of Nova Scotia called on the federal government to improve its offers and increase the amounts proposed to workers.
One million dollars is a lot of money, but when 1,000 people find themselves without work, one million divided by 1,000 is only $1,000 each. This will not pay the grocery bill for very long, or the rent, and it will not put clothes on children's backs for very long either; $1,000 will be gone very quickly. These 1,000 employees are going to end up on social assistance fairly quickly.
They are being offered more than $1,000, but nothing that will really keep them going for much more than a year. These families will be in a very shaky situation.
I would like to depart from my prepared text and share with the House the conversations I had with those representing workers at the time last year when I myself was the Bloc Quebecois' natural resources critic.
I had occasion to meet with mothers who had travelled here to Ottawa to make parliamentarians aware of the fate in store for their husbands, their partners or their sons if the Devco mine were to close. Let us look at the broader picture.
The Devco mine is basically a coal mine. Coal is less popular than it used to be. It is a fairly polluting substance. Therefore, planning to shut down a coal mine, when coal is less in demand internationally, for the reasons I have just given, is not, in itself, illogical. The problem is the approach being taken.
For some time now, the Devco mine has been run for the federal government. When we are dealing with a region like Cape Breton and more than 1,000 people who are going to lose their jobs, this is catastrophic in a community where there are not many employment alternatives. In short, the federal government is, with its good intentions of terminating operations for the extraction of a raw material, coal, no longer in fashion in the world market, committing the huge mistake of penalizing a region, with catastrophic results.
Quite simply, once the people have exhausted their benefits, their separation payments, the outcome will be despair and a complete lack of job opportunities.
They will then have two choices: taking their families and settling elsewhere in Canada, in order to make a living, or remaining where they are, in most cases dependent on welfare.
By using this bill to close the mine under the present circumstances, the federal government is, to all intents and purposes, thrusting a region of Nova Scotia into a disastrous economic situation, one that will be very long term. This is not something that will be remedied in six months or a year. It will take decades to be rectified, if ever, because its very clear consequences will be an exodus of families and increased poverty in this region.
I mentioned earlier, I had the opportunity to meet the wives of the miners and mine workers who are unemployed. The problem could probably have been lessened in various ways, and the unions made proposals—and it was not just the unions that made proposals—that, for the most part, meant that many of the 1,000 workers could have faster access to their pension.
There were a number of ways to go about it. The pensions could have been beefed up for those close to retirement, within two or three years of it—and there were several hundred of them—other workers could have been kept on working in the mine, while the facilities were being shut down. From what I understand, the facilities will be closed by an outside corporation, that may perhaps hire these people for a short while, but will not contribute to the pension fund they have already accumulated.
In short, there were solutions. They could really not have cost more in the medium term. They could definitely cost less in the long term. The government thinks it is only in the very short term that savings will be made, and making a saving in human terms in the very short term is really wasting human capital and thus wasting resources in the medium and long term. This is exactly the situation we are in with Bill C-11, to close the Devco mine.
I do not know how the House could influence the minister to change his decision. I have the impression that things are cast in stone. It is really with great regret and sadness that I realize that the representations made by the people of Cape Breton who came to explain the situation, by the union representatives and by the members of the House, have not had the results we had hoped for.
Again, the short term saving made by the government will be replaced by waste and numerous expenditures in the medium and long terms, particularly for the Province of Nova Scotia, which will have to support, through social assistance, families that will find themselves in a precarious situation.
The Bloc Quebecois does not like this situation. The Bloc Quebecois has a heart and it wants the government to also have a heart. I will conclude by expressing my sympathy and wishing the best of luck to those brave Devco workers, who, unfortunately, are being mistreated by the Liberal federal government, which has no heart.